Day 333: Feasting in Quarantine

You wake up and look at your watch. It’s 7:30am. Darn, you’re not waking up at 5am like you wanted to, but you did go to sleep at 12am yesterday trying to get some final bits of code working. At least you’re not working up at 11am or noon like you were back home in California.

For the past week and half, you’ve been sticking to your daily regiment of meditating for 30 minutes and exercising using your calisthenics routine or the Ashtanga primary series, but you’re not really feeling it today. You weren’t really feeling it yesterday either, but unlike then, you’re not able to muster up the effort to do it anyway.

You tell yourself that you’ll do the morning routine later, knowing full well that that it’ll almost certainly never happen. You seal the deal when you sit at your computer. You wiggle your mouse.

Code. You’re in the middle of redesigning one of the major flows in a Chrome extension you’ve been building for the last six (or is it seven now?) months. You know deep inside that this could wait and you should focus on getting the product out there, but the perfectionist within you can’t let it go. This will be your downfall, and you know it.

You get to work.

It’s 3pm. It’s past the 6am to 2pm eating window you had decided on for your intermittent fasting routine, but you’ve only had 1200 calories worth of food so far so you should probably eat. You know exactly how much you’ve consumed because those 1200 calories came from 3 servings of the powder in a bag that you have stashed away in the bathroom. So many bags. When will you finish them all?

You have two choices: Solid food in a bag or liquid food in a bag. Solid comes in Tomato & Herb and Thai Green Curry, and liquid comes in Peanut Butter, Vanilla, Original, and Unflavored & Unsweetened. You are becoming a connoisseur of glop. Of these, the Thai Green Curry mixture, the Peanut Butter powder, and the Vanilla powder are the best. You didn’t like Vanilla at first, but it sort of grew on you as you kept chugging those bottles. Everything somehow grows on you after a while. Thanks, taste buds.

You decide to go for something solid after three liquid meals, but you remember that you finished off both the Tomato & Herb and Thai Green Curry bags yesterday. You have one more of each, but opening up a new bag seems wasteful when there are so many already-opened bags of powder. The shelf life for each of these bags is a year, and you wonder how much it gets shortened once you open it and expose it to air. How does this stuff stay good for an entire year anyway? You do a half and half of Vanilla and Unsweetened and shake it vigorously. Boom. Exercise for the day. Back to work.

You’re stuck. The thing you made works decently well, but you struggle to think of the right interaction model for it. How do you make it discoverable but unobtrusive? Normally, you’d go take a walk to let your subconscious do some magic where a solution inexplicably appears, but the only place to walk here is the bathroom, which is 10 steps away. The problem is hard so you look for a distraction. You’re not hungry, but you wondering whether you should order food. Maybe something yummy would be nice.

You open up “foodpanda”, the popular food delivery app here. Uber Eats works here, too, but somehow foodpanda has better English support and Uber Eats asks you to create an account every time you open the app and you’d rather not, so foodpanda it is. You type “vegan” in the search box and look through the options. Even though the app’s interface is in English, most restaurants have their menus entirely in Chinese so you have to constantly take screenshots, import them to Google Translate, highlight the menu items, wonder what the heck “Spicy Crispy G” is, go back to the menu, scroll down, take another screenshot, and repeat until you find the things you want.

Hallelujah. You find a restaurant that has an English menu. You order a noodle dish and a small collection of items that somehow cost just a dollar each: Spicy Tofu, Chinese Long Bean, Fried Bread Stick, Tempura, Taro Rick Cake (you assume that it’s supposed to “Rice Cake” but you google it anyway just to be sure and Google autocompletes it to “Taro Rick and Morty”. Ordered.) The total comes out to about $8, including delivery. So cheap!

You’re excited for the food to arrive since you’ve been guzzling shakes and soups for the past week and a half for all but two meals. Somehow this generates a spurt of motivation to at least do a tiny bit of your morning routine so you bust out some dips while precariously holding yourself up by your desk and chair. That builds up enough momentum to do a few sun salutations, too. Better than nothing.

Foodpanda says that the food’s arrived, but since you’re not allowed to leave your room, you wait until you get a LINE message from the hotel staff saying that they’ve placed the food in front of your door. The message comes. They sent a sticker of a bear with a salt and shaker. How cute. You send back a bunny with a gaping grin.

You crack open your door, pick up the bag on the chair, and excitedly bring it in. It’s much heavier than you expected it to be. You open the bag and pull out two bowls. One is filled with fried noodles and the other is some hot pot thing. Uh. Did you order this? You look at it and wonder whether all your items are combined in there somehow. Nope. There’s no Taro Rick and Morty Cake here. This is the wrong order.

You find the option in foodpanda for reporting a mistake and there’s an option to have the restaurant send you another one. But you can’t do that because the hotel only allows dinner delivery from 6pm to 7pm and it’s now past 7pm. What would you do with all that extra food anyway? You can’t keep this stuff in a bag for a year.

The noodles look like what you ordered so at least they got one item right. You try it. It’s okay. Given how basic your tastes are, that must mean it’s pretty bad. You turn your attention to the hot pot thing and don’t recognize the pool party of mysterious objects. These chunks are obviously tofu. Those things look like fish cakes? Everything is questionable. You eat the tofu and toss the rest. What a waste.

Even though it’s not very good, you finish the noodles because you’ve never been able to overcome your childhood conditioning of finishing your food. You’re stuffed. And it was so not worth it. Maybe you’ll try ordering something different tomorrow to make up for today’s disappointment.

But what about all those bags in the bathroom?